Roundel Zone

The Los Angeles Auto Show is a big deal for several reasons, but it remains the Rodney Dangerfield of car shows. In a romantic comedy, the LA show would be the leading lady’s wisecracking best friend: attractive enough, and fun to be around, but when you get right down to it, she ain’t gonna get the guy.

In response to last week’s eleven-car enumeration, CCA member Bill Schaefer e-mailed me his list, which included a vintage Fiat 500. It made me think about the 1974 Fiat 128 we had when I was in high school. It wasn’t the car that I learned to drive in—that distinction goes to our beloved ’69 Plymouth Satellite, the first car my mother bought by herself after my dad passed away.

It’s an interesting time to be an automotive enthusiast. On one side of the car coin, we can purchase—for an admittedly substantial sum of money—a nearly-600-horsepower M5 sedan that is capable of transferring copious amounts of rubber to the ground while coddling its occupants with heated seats and multi-zone air conditioning. You can even simultaneously blast the a/c and crank up the backside warmers—just for fun. Don’t worry, your car won’t judge you.

Last week, I brought home the Shark, which clicked the car-counter into the unprecedented nosebleed territory of eleven. For the record, the basic enumeration is this: There are, as I like think of them, the Nixon-era triplets: the ’72 2002tii, the ’72 Bavaria, and the ’73 3.0CSi. There are the Zs: the ’99 Z3 and Z3 M coupe. There is the recently purchased E30 ’87 325is I wrote about in Roundel.

I hear Led Zeppelin’s “Trampled Under Foot” playing somewhere in the distance. I hear the sound of fluorescent lights humming overhead. I see on my calendar that it’s fall. All of these things pile a heap of depression the size of a large sedan on my brain.